Exercise changed the mental abilities of children and adults in different ways
Researchers from the University of South Australia tried to track exactly how exercise affects a person's cognitive, executive ability and memory at any given age. It turned out that they work most effectively at the age when they are least often thought about.
The human body is designed in such a way that one's mental capacity is seriously linked to physical fitness. This is not surprising when you consider that up to 20% of the body's energy goes into servicing brain function, and the highest peak mental workloads can temporarily raise this figure even higher. That's why intelligence and cognitive ability tests are, on average, performed better by people who exercise regularly.
This does not mean, of course, that athletes are on average smarter than non-athletes: the figures refer specifically to society on average, that is, regularly exercising groups of comparable ages and occupations perform better on average than people of the same ages and occupations who do not exercise. But until now, there has been no attempt to understand whether the strength of this effect of exercise on test scores varies across ages.
Australian researchers conducted a meta-analysis of 133 reviews of 2,724 research papers with 260,000 participants that touched on the effects of exercise on cognitive tests for a wide variety of demographic groups. They published an article about this in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. As expected, the average impact was significant: exercise raised scores on tests of general cognitive ability by 42%, memory by 26%, and executive function (which controls the rest of cognitive function) by 24%.
In children and adolescents, exercise improved memory test scores by 85%, in adults (except the elderly) by 20%, and in the elderly by 27%. Tests of general cognitive ability gave the opposite picture: in children and adolescents, exercise improved scores by only 28%, in adults but not seniors by 40%, and in the elderly by 42%. Executive functions improved by 36% in the very young, and by 23% in adults and seniors. And for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the improvement was 72%.
It turns out that memory and executive functions in minors respond to exercise much better than at any other age. At the same time, it is known that it is at a young age that attention to exercise is traditionally minimal. At the same time, it has been found that specifically for general cognitive abilities, adults and the elderly benefit significantly more from exercise than children and adolescents.
The new research paper has a number of limitations because the authors involved a wide variety of different types of exercise. The bulk of the original research was based on low- to moderate-intensity exercise. But papers that took into account yoga and tai chi (they gave better effects on memory than anything else), and even Pokemon Go (gave the maximum improvement on overall cognitive ability) were also included. Clearly, such different exercises should also produce different effects by age. But limited breakdowns of the data across them prevented the researchers from clarifying this point.
Separately, they noted that the effects of exercise on tests in all age groups appeared very quickly, from one to three months after starting. The problem remains that it's hard to call these findings particularly useful in practice. As the WHO notes, 80% of minors and 31% of adults are exercise deficient, and the situation shows no trend to change in recent decade.